SPACE AVAILABLE

by Sharon Olson

They call it the landscape of fear,
the sense that humans are near,
ears pricked to catch the menace
of car engines, commerce unabated.

So the deer were always nearby,
watching for safe spaces, as if
they might be able to read
the stickers on library doors.

The map has now been redrawn,
if the foxes can come out of hiding,
say the deer, then so can we,
nobody seems to be stopping us.

We are now hosting a family of deer,
our yard a new venue for outdoor dining,
our menu of specials features straight-up
hostas, day lilies, rosehips for dessert.

In dark of night, though, a new creature
has joined the neighborhood menagerie,
squirrels and mice beware, the fisher cat
pierces the silence with its strangling call.

Sharon Olson is a retired librarian who lives in Lawrenceville, New Jersey. Her book The Long Night of Flying was published by Sixteen Rivers Press in 2006. Her second book Will There Be Music? was published by Cherry Grove Collections in 2019.

IMPRESSION

by W.F. Lantry

Our marbled cherry trees have lost their leaves.

It’s not yet solstice. Birds are gathering

in hidden trees along the riverside.

I listen to them from the forest’s edge

and mark the dew on willows, heavy pods

of wisteria, weighing down each separate vine,

disordered grass stems tangling Mary’s feet.

We’ve each spent lifetimes learning all these signs:

our Fall is coming, even though the days

seem long enough to finish everything.

I take on so little. I take on far too much:

the red clay pond, half dug and filled with rain

beckons. It’s pleasant work, but other tasks

with other frames conspire. Is there time?

And yesterday, at dusk, we crossed a field.

I offered her my shirt against the cold

and noticed how the hawks have disappeared

replaced by owls and foxes, how the deer

made bold by wind, invade, how sedum change

from white to rose. Some moving into red

presage feathered designs of ice-framed ponds.

W.F. Lantry’s poetry collections are The Structure of Desire (Little Red Tree 2012), winner of a 2013 Nautilus Award in Poetry, The Language of Birds(Finishing Line 2011), and a forthcoming collection The Book of Maps. Honors include the National Hackney Literary Award in Poetry, CutBank Patricia Goedicke Prize, Crucible Editors' Poetry Prize, Lindberg Foundation International Poetry for Peace Prize (Israel), and the Potomac Review and LaNelle Daniel Prizes. His work has appeared in Atlanta Review, Asian Cha and Aesthetica. He works in Washington, DC and is an associate fiction editor at JMWW.